Motorola Milestone review

I have a perfectly good mobile phone. It texts, it emails, it takes photos. I can even ring people. But when I was offered the use of Telecom’s whizzo new Motorola Milestone, running Google’s Android operating system that’s knocked sliced bread off its ‘greatest thing’ perch, I was keen, real keen.

I was out to lunch (so to speak) recently with our Online Response Team, and listened as the guys debated the philosophical and technological differences between the iPhone and Android. Basically, the iPhone is like Steve Job’s famous black turtleneck – warm and comforting, but slightly restrictive, while Android is like a Che Guevara tee-shirt: hip and revolutionary.

But first, a disclaimer: if you want to know how many megarings a phone can omni-vate per quasi-spagbot, read Pat Pilcher on the page opposite. But if you want to know how a grown man can get sucked into farting about on a smartphone when he’s supposed to be supervising his two year old son in the bath, that’s where my tech analysis strengths lie.

I’ve spent many an enjoyable evening swearing loudly at mobile phone manuals, but Android denied me this cathartic pleasure (don’t worry, team, I took my latent anger out on a missing remote control later) by setting up my contacts, email, my gmail accounts and twitter in about ten minutes flat. I was impressed.

The first thing that stuck me was this phone is FAST – the Milestone takes full advantage of XT’s HSPA+ upgrade, so there’s minimal waiting about while your email downloads. You push a button, stuff happens. Easy.
Then, I had a saunter through the Android Market, where you buy ‘apps’ or applications – I chose a Flickr photography app, a few games for the bus and the Kindle e-reader. There’s loads to choose from, and I could see myself loading up like a Harrods boxing day sale.

The web browser was a revelation, working like computer browser you ‘zoom into’ with your fingers to make the text bigger and readable. On Saturday, me and my partner spent twenty minutes or so on the couch surfing websites on the phone – not having to get up and ‘go use the computer’ to use the internet was cool. This was doing stuff together, and it was nice.

Did the Milestone make me more productive? I’ll say yes. Did it make me more popular? I’ll say no. Despite its bulk, weight, a slide out keyboard I found a bit superfluous and voice performance that’s a little… crackly, I thoroughly enjoyed using Android and the Milestone. You’d love it too – take it from a guy that knows next to nothing about phones.